Advancing Quantitative Methods in Criminology and Criminal Justice is designed to promote the understanding of various quantitative research methods and to encourage their use among those seeking answers to questions about crime and justice. To this end a number of top scholars have been assembled to provide their insights on a variety of 'cutting edge' quantitative research techniques. The chapters that appear delve into the state of quantitative methods in the discipline, group-based trajectory modeling, spatial dependence models, structural equation models, meta-analysis, social network designs, panel data modeling, and censored regression techniques. This book will be highly beneficial for readers who seek to stay as current as possible as they pursue answers to questions about crime and justice using quantitative research methods. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice Education.

Advancing Quantitative Methods in Criminology and Criminal Justice is designed to promote the understanding of various quantitative research methods and to encourage their use among those seeking answers to questions about crime and justice. To this end a number of top scholars have been assembled to provide their insights on a variety of 'cutting edge' quantitative research techniques. The chapters that appear delve into the state of quantitative methods in the discipline, group-based trajectory modeling, spatial dependence models, structural equation models, meta-analysis, social network designs, panel data modeling, and censored regression techniques. This book will be highly beneficial for readers who seek to stay as current as possible as they pursue answers to questions about crime and justice using quantitative research methods. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice Education.

For several decades qualitative research has been under-represented in criminological and criminal justice research. This book is designed to promote the understanding of qualitative research designs and to encourage their use among those seeking answers to questions about crime and justice. To this end a number of top qualitative scholars have been assembled to provide their insights on the topic. The chapters that appear delve into the state of qualitative methods in the discipline, the potential ethical and physical hazards of engaging in ethnographic research, how to make sense of and interpret participants’ stories, innovative ways to collect data, the value of using mixed methods to understand crime and justice issues, effective strategies for teaching fieldwork, and the inherent rewards of a career spent speaking with others. This book will be an ideal introduction for students and scholars of Criminal Justice, Criminology, and Sociology, regardless of whether their primary methodology is qualitative or quantitative. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice Education.

Advancing Criminology and Criminal Justice Policy is a definitive sourcebook that is comprised of contributions from some of the most recognized experts in criminology and criminal justice policy. The book is essential reading for students taking upper level courses and seminars on crime, public policy and crime prevention, as well as for policy makers within the criminal justice sphere. There has been a growing recognition of the importance of evidence-based criminal justice policies from criminologists, policymakers, and practitioners. Yet, despite governmental and professional association efforts to promote the role of criminological research in criminal justice policy, political ideologies, fear, and the media heavily influence criminal justice policies and practices. Bridging the gap between research and policy, this book provides the best-available research evidence, identifies strategies for informing policy and offers direct policy recommendations for a number of pressing contemporary issues in criminal justice, including: Delinquency, intervention programs and community crime prevention, Problem-oriented policing and the science of hot-spot policing, Sentencing and drug courts, Community corrections, incarceration and rehabilitation, Mental illness, gender, aging and indigenous communities.

For several decades qualitative research has been under-represented in criminological and criminal justice research. This book is designed to promote the understanding of qualitative research designs and to encourage their use among those seeking answers to questions about crime and justice. To this end a number of top qualitative scholars have been assembled to provide their insights on the topic. The chapters that appear delve into the state of qualitative methods in the discipline, the potential ethical and physical hazards of engaging in ethnographic research, how to make sense of and interpret participants’ stories, innovative ways to collect data, the value of using mixed methods to understand crime and justice issues, effective strategies for teaching fieldwork, and the inherent rewards of a career spent speaking with others. This book will be an ideal introduction for students and scholars of Criminal Justice, Criminology, and Sociology, regardless of whether their primary methodology is qualitative or quantitative. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice Education.

This book provides the student, researcher or practitioner with the tools to understand many of the most commonly used advanced statistical analysis tools in criminology and criminal justice, and also to apply them to research problems. The volume is structured around two main topics, giving the user flexibility to find what they need quickly. The first is “the general linear model” which is the main analytic approach used to understand what influences outcomes in crime and justice. It presents a series of approaches from OLS multivariate regression, through logistic regression and multi-nomial regression, hierarchical regression, to count regression. The volume also examines alternative methods for estimating unbiased outcomes that are becoming more common in criminology and criminal justice, including analyses of randomized experiments and propensity score matching. It also examines the problem of statistical power, and how it can be used to better design studies. Finally, it discusses meta analysis, which is used to summarize studies; and geographic statistical analysis, which allows us to take into account the ways in which geographies may influence our statistical conclusions.

Quantitative criminology has certainly come a long way since I was ?rst introduced to a largely qualitative criminology some 40 years ago, when I was recruited to lead a task force on science and technology for the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. At that time, criminology was a very limited activity, depending almost exclusively on the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) initiated by the FBI in 1929 for measurement of crime based on victim reports to the police and on police arrests. A ty- cal mode of analysis was simple bivariate correlation. Marvin Wolfgang and colleagues were makingan importantadvancebytrackinglongitudinaldata onarrestsin Philadelphia,an in- vation that was widely appreciated. And the ?eld was very small: I remember attending my ?rst meeting of the American Society of Criminology in about 1968 in an anteroom at New York University; there were about 25–30 people in attendance, mostly sociologists with a few lawyers thrown in. That Society today has over 3,000 members, mostly now drawn from criminology which has established its own clear identity, but augmented by a wide variety of disciplines that include statisticians, economists, demographers, and even a few engineers. This Handbook provides a remarkable testimony to the growth of that ?eld. Following the maxim that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t understand it,” we have seen the early dissatisfaction with the UCR replaced by a wide variety of new approaches to measuring crime victimization and offending.